Recital by Martina Janková and Ivo Kahánek
L. Janáček – Moravian folk poetry in Song (selection)
Martina Janková: soprano
Roman Hoza: baritone
Ivo Kahánek: piano
During his lifetime, the world-renowned opera composer Janáček was long regarded as a folklorist. From the late 1880s he exhibited a purposeful interest in the Moravian folk song, an interest which was inspired by collaboration with František Bartoš on collections of folk songs. This activity gave rise to the idea of creating the popularBouquet of Moravian Folk Songs (1890), which contained a selection from the collections of Bartoš, Sušil and others. In the early 1890s Bouquet was reissued as a narrowed-down selection of 53 songs with piano accompaniments by Janáček. The edition was soon used in music teaching by Janáček himself at the Teachers’ Institute and the Second Czech Gymnasium in Brno; it gradually came to be better known and its growing popularity inspired the Telč-based publisher Emil Šolc to take on the task of preparing a new edition in 1908 with the title Moravian Folk Poetry in Songs. This slim volume is without a doubt the best-known opus of its genre and it earned Janáček a reputation as one of the best arrangers of folk songs. If we enquire about the reasons for this success, the answer might be that through his detailed structural analysis of the folk song the composer arrived at an expert characterization of it and through his creative arrangements he recast this knowledge into musical miniatures which he endowed with his distinctive musical poetics.
